Recently I happened to visit Bangalore after almost a decade and a half. A city that occupies forever fresh place in my memories that are as lush green with nostalgia as the city used to be at that time. The purpose of the visit co-incidentally happened to be the very reason why I left it at first. Curiously, the same place where I had begun my tryst with Bangalore happened to be the place of visit this time as well. The differences couldn’t be starker between what it was then and now with one constant factor being the swirling storms of mosquitoes sharp at 6 every evening. Considering that they outlived Jurassic era to give us Jurassic park movie, guess you can safely assume a span of decade is hardly blink of an eye timeline for them. What we had estimated as a 6-hour journey overall became inflated by 50% with the overall duration of one-way trip hitting close to 10 hours, with a good part of the last 2 hours spent on standstill traffic, somewhere between Hosur and Marathahalli. With the crematorium being somewhere near an army cantonment, sitting on a vehicle with nothing to kill but time, I was trying to recollect the same route, that used to be our weekend jaunt, visiting factory outlets one after another, culminating in dinner at Madhuri hotel near the Wind tunnel road junction or parcel from Kitchen (a single room Punjabi restaurant at a building’s basement). I couldn’t find a single outlet, obviously and the only surviving member being Brand factory, which had opened afresh then, doing a Reliance on other nearby smaller outlets. I remembered the roads to be much smaller and narrower than they are now and yet the volume of traffic was never this maddeningly bad. Almost every road that I went through had either doubled or tripled in size, yet the traffic seems to have increased several folds more. Possibly every Bangalorean to vehicle ratio could easily be more than 1:5. Every 5th vehicle was a Tata Nexon with only one person manning that beast of a vehicle. So much for minimalism!! How much ever I tried to relate to familiar places, that remained same only in name, I could hardly remember how they were then to what they had became now!! 15 years may be too much of a time gap in this age of expansionism, but still the amount of change that had taken place had morphed my favorite areas into an unrecognizable one. The CMH road through which we used to walk back home, having had heavy dinner or lunch at some restaurant, the cantonment road and commercial streets where I used to buy dresses for my sister, the Jeevan Bheema nagar or JB nagar that has been rechristened as Jai Bheem nagar (when I mentioned that it used to be called as Jeevan Bheema nagar the driver raised his eyebrows a bit before stressing it back as Jai bheem nagar), the Bangalore I knew and fell in love with, is no longer different from any concrete jungle of a major metro. All those flyovers and broadened road that are forever in “under construction mode” lack of trees even on the famed old madras road and old HAL office, the arch like tree setup where trees on either side of the roads will bend into a welcome kind of arch, where even a slight drizzle will see a rush of sweaters and hoodies, that Bangalore remains afresh only in mind and guess that is one place where it will continue to remain green. Looking at Bangalore of today, felt as if you are meeting your ex who got married to some bad guy and had been through the worst of life. If this is the cost of development, it was better left under developed!!
I try to read one book per month minimum. Most of 2022 was spent on Alex cross series by James Patterson as I wanted to finish the series. Having completed about a dozen or so of that 2 dozen and odd series, had hardly posted a review for the reason, none of them were that impressive. James Patterson thrives on psycho villains and serial killers who are very meticulous and almost always have Alex cross as the one who crosses their path. In fact, till the last reveal, it would be very difficult to guess the “whodunnit”. But rather than that being the plus the reveal often make you realize, just for the sake of a grand twist, such characterizations serve no purpose. The fellow person who would’ve travelled throughout the story as a close associate of Cross would often be the serial psycho killer. It became a standard template across all those stories and had given up reading that series altogether. This one was long pending on the list of unread and had started reading just to close the ...
Comments
One of my elderly friend told me in 2012: "if you speculate even by 1% that a person or place are detrimentally unaligned with what you have preserved in your memory, don't bother to rekindle the connection. You are risking the replacement of a happy memory with bitter ones, and it's not worth the pain." I followed it very religiously these days. Under unavoidable circumstances, I keep telling my mind that these are two different people/places, so don't compare. It helps.
In one sense, I am actually happy to see large number of vehicles. It simply means that a personal vehicle is no longer only for the elite and almost everybody these days can enjoy personal transportation. Bangalore has nurtured enormous economic development of a large number of people. Millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, thanks to our cities. Some of the side effects like the poor civic infrastructure are there, but that has always been the problem in India. But I am comforted by the "democratisation of wealth" instead of it being only for a privileged few.